Dick Cheney's unfashionable virtues

Such poisonous invective has become commonplace in today's degraded political culture — on the unhinged left no less than the perfervid right. What is not commonplace are the qualities Cheney brought to his public career: a steady conservatism, a restrained ego, and a moral seriousness. David Frum, who met Cheney in the 1990s when they both attended events at the American Enterprise Institute, found him to be "a man who spoke little, listened deeply, and fitted everything he heard into a well-stocked and well-organized mind."

Like Bush, the president he would serve with fidelity for eight years, Cheney understood that history, not the daily news cycle, would have the last word on his actions. Unlike many other Washington grandees and insiders, Cheney didn't hedge his bets, maneuvering behind the scenes to deflect responsibility for unpopular policies, disparage decisions he had opposed, or cultivate reporters who might later make him look good.

"I made the decision when I signed on with the president," Cheney told an interviewer in 2007, "that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents — and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over." In an era when vice presidents often act as auditioning candidates, Cheney's discipline and restraint seem almost quaint.

Cheney made his career and rose to power as a Republican Party stalwart. But when it mattered most, his devotion to country superseded his loyalty to party. Nothing showed that more vividly than his forthright break with Donald Trump for refusing to accept the 2020 presidential election results and for encouraging the attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

"In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," Cheney later declared. It was not a popular view within the GOP, but Cheney didn't measure his principles by the mood of a crowd. He applauded his daughter Liz's own decision to follow that path, even as it cost her a seat in Congress and made her a pariah in her own party. For the Cheneys, patriotism was not conditional on party alignment.

Having served as White House chief of staff under former president Gerald Ford and secretary of defense under former president George H.W. Bush, Cheney was a realist about power and evil — never more so than after 9/11. Even realists can be wrong, of course, and Cheney's vigorous defense of what the White House called "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding against captured terrorists was indefensible, as Senator John McCain said at the time.

But on what became the central issue of post-9/11 foreign policy, Cheney was right. Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq could not be allowed to remain in power. The Iraqi dictator may not have had the extensive stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction" that Western intelligence services had claimed, but that didn't diminish Saddam's malignance or the threat he posed. He had committed ghastly crimes against humanity — invading neighboring countries, gassing civilians by the thousands, engaging in torture on a terrifying scale, sponsoring international terrorism, and attempting to assassinate a US president.

Cheney's foreign-policy outlook rested on a principle now unfashionable across the political spectrum: that America must lead. He insisted that the world needs a policeman — and that only the United States can fill that role honorably. "For the better part of a century," as he wrote in 2015, "security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America's military, economic, political and diplomatic might." That wasn't imperial swagger but moral realism — the understanding that peace and liberty survive only when they are defended, and that when the United States retreats from its role in defending them, the world grows more dangerous.

One historian has written of "the inexplicable mystery of Cheney's life: How exactly had a once beloved public servant — a soft-spoken conservative who worked with Gerald Ford to defeat rival Ronald Reagan — been reduced to demonic status during the furor that erupted after 9/11?" The answer, I think, is that Cheney's virtues were out of step with the times. He believed in duty more than popularity, in clarity more than sentimentality, in seriousness more than showmanship. For him, public service was not a stage for self-expression but a calling.

The winds of political fashion changed, but Cheney didn't. As the most consequential vice president in living memory, he didn't chase applause or reshape himself to suit the polls. He was steady when others wavered, loyal when others schemed, and fearless when others equivocated.

He was, in short, a statesman — a word now so rarely deserved that its meaning has almost been forgotten. In an age when many politicians treat conviction as a liability, Dick Cheney's unbending sense of duty looks downright heroic.

He was sometimes wrong, but he was never timid. And he was never false to his convictions. His critics may have the floor now, but history will get it right.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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